GMAT Strategy

First of all, you're misreading your score. Your quant is not lower than your verbal - a 39 is higher than a 38! Your quant percentile is lower, but that's virtually meaningless.

Percentiles fluctuate yearly, based on who's taking the test. They do *not* reflect anything about ability. In the past 10 years especially, the GMAT has become more international, causing quant scores to increase, and percentiles therefore to decrease. The opposite is happening on the verbal side. A score of 39 on quant represents the same ability level as it did 15 years ago, even though the percentile has dropped.

More on this here: https://www.manhattanprep.com/gmat/blog ... mat-score/

Schools know that percentiles change. What they care about (or at least what they should) is the ability level of students. If an admissions official spoke about percentiles instead, that actually shows a pretty big misunderstanding of how the GMAT works.

The issue is not that a 39th percentile is a low percentile. The issue is that a score of 39 would be considered relatively low in real terms. Because much of the work done in business school is quantitative, schools often have a higher or stricter bar for quant scores than for verbal scores. Most top-10 schools would expect quant scores of 47 or higher, and top-30 schools would probably want a 43-45 or higher.

That said, if you have other evidence of quantitative skills - undergraduate coursework or work experience - you may not need the GMAT to tell that story for you.